Climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016

Climate change impacts on society
Indicator selection
This section uses one indicator, which combines
information on heating degree days (HDDs) and cooling
degree days (CDDs), as a proxy for climate change
impacts on energy demand. The sections that follow
present information on changes in energy demand,
electricity production and energy infrastructure, which
do not qualify to be presented as indicators owing to
limited data availability.
Data quality and data needs
The climatological input datasets for computing HDDs
and CDDs for Europe combine temperature data with
daily resolution from three different station datasets —
the JRC's MARS meteorological database (EC, 2015), the
NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)'s Global
Historical Climatology Network dataset (GHCN; Menne
et al., 2012) and the European Climate and Assessment
Dataset of the Royal Meteorological Institute of the
Netherlands (KNMI-ECA&D; Klein Tank and Wijngaard,
2002) — and from one gridded dataset (E-OBS
versions 10 and 11; Haylock et al., 2008). These datasets
are considered rather robust. However, different
definitions exist for computing HDDs and CDDs, which
can lead to different magnitudes of calculated trends
(see Section 5.4.2).
Information on past and projected impacts of
climate change on electricity demand and electricity
generation is very fragmented. The effect of long-term
climate change can be difficult to determine owing to
concurrent changes in technical, social, behavioural and
economic aspects, while the effects of extreme events
are usually easier to detect.
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